It’s going to be difficult for the Hawks to top last season’s surprising run to 60 Ws and (finally) the East finals, though thankfully 2015-16 will be free of any background drama. At least four Hawks players had career years in 2015 and one of those (super swingman DeMarre Carroll) now plays for the Raptors with no comparable replacement on the roster.
So how far will the Hawks fall? The statistical site FiveThirtyEight.com provides its answer as part of its NBA team-by-team preview: 45 wins.
Neil Paine, a former Hawks consultant, writes that victory total “may not place the Hawks among the top half of Eastern Conference playoff teams.” The FiveThirtyEight projection calls for “declines from practically all of the players who powered Atlanta’s unexpected rise, particularly Paul Millsap and Kyle Korver.”
The projections are based on the CARMELO metric created by FiveThirtyEight guru Nate Silver. It seeks to forecast the career trajectory of every NBA player by comparing them to similar players through the league's history. See details here.
Regarding Millsap, Paine writes that his historically comparable players "declined steeply from this point in their careers onward." CARMELO predicts Millsap to have the fifth-biggest drop in wins above replacement from last season to this one among all NBA players.
Similarly, CARMELO says Korver will lose the ninth-most WAR from last year to this year. Still, Paine writes that Korver’s “comp list is also littered with sharpshooters who played with grace into their late 30s.”
The retort to these statistical projection models, especially those that focus on individual players, is that they can’t capture chemistry. It’s a fair critique, especially for a sport such as basketball that relies so much on interconnectedness. It’s an argument that’s particularly relevant for the Hawks, whose synergistic style in 2013-14 made their whole better than the sum of their parts.
But it's hard to argue with the cold, hard data of FiveThirtyEight’s CARMELO projections.
I agree that Millsap and Korver won’t be as good and Al Horford will see a gentler decline. Jeff Teague probably won’t repeat his career year. The wing is iffy without Carroll because Tim Hardaway Jr. is sub-replacement level, and Thabo Sefolosha is a net negative in comparison to Carroll because his lack of offense offsets his good defense—and the Hawks are in real trouble if Sefolosha can’t return to form physically.
The only area in which the Hawks absolutely got better was at backup big. Tiago Splitter is a good player who gives Mike Budenholzer the option of sending out a true big lineup. But that's not nearly enough to offset the areas in which the Hawks figure to be worse.
Vegas set the Hawks win total at 49.5 (tied for second-highest in the East behind the Cavs) so put me down for the under.
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